Shearwater has transformed itself to the point of reinvention on Palo Santo, the band’s fourth album. The first Shearwater release to be made up entirely of songs by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg, Palo Santo resembles previous Shearwater albums only incidentally. It’s a thrilling, paradoxical record—icily warm, welcoming and threatening, sloppy and immaculate—and one which NPR called “impossibly majestic and beautiful” in naming it the best record of 2006.

Shearwater has transformed itself to the point of reinvention on Palo Santo, the band’s fourth album. The first Shearwater release to be made up entirely of songs by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg, Palo Santo resembles previous Shearwater albums only incidentally. It’s a thrilling, paradoxical record—icily warm, welcoming and threatening, sloppy and immaculate—and one which NPR called “impossibly majestic and beautiful” in naming it the best record of 2006.